League Action for Jews in Upper Silesia Has Not Helped, Says Guardian

The League of Nations intervention in favor of the Jewish minorities in Upper Silesia has made no real difference, the Manchester Guardian declared today in a special dispatch, following an investigation in the plebiscite area. On June 7, the Council of the League of Nations, accepted the Sean Lester report on the petition of Franz Bernheim, a Silesian Jew, and ordered the German government to restore the rights of the Silesian Jews.

The Guardian declares that the position of the Jews in Upper Silesia continues to be exceedingly grave. The Jews are subjected to the same discriminations, humiliations and maltreatment that exist in the rest of Germany.

Although the majority of the 150 Jewish lawyers, doctors and judges have been reinstated, it is almost impossible for them to continue in their professions. The famous English liberal paper estimates that ten thousand Jewish artisans, shopkeepers and working men and women, have been deprived of a livelihood.

JEWS THEORETICALLY SAFE

In theory; says the Guardian, the Jewish minority enjoys special safeguards, but in practice their health, life and property, are still insecure.

In a single day, on June 28, the Guardian correspondent met five Jews, two German citizens and three Poles, who were arrested, beaten and expelled from Upper Silesia, he reported. Since the families of the men are still there, the correspondent did not reveal their names.

Thirty Jews are in jail in Gleiwitz, Beuthen and Oppeln, in Silesia. Polish Jews who complain to the Polish consul are driven out of Silesia on various pretexts and the Jews who were originally dismissed from their posts because they were Jews, are now being dismissed through alleged accusations of Socialism, and re-religious Jews are charged with Communism Fictitious lists of alleged Communists are prepared and used for that purpose. Judges before whom the cases are brought, recognize these fictitious lists as sufficient proof for dismissal, the Guardian declares.

FORCED TO DISMISS JEWS

Not only the Christian firms, but even the Jewish firms were forced to dismiss their Jewish employees, the Guardian reveals, quoting cases of Jewish employers, who were arrested and threatened that unless they dismissed their Jewish employees, they would be charged with Communism and expelled from business altogether. There are Jewish shops in Beuthen, Hindenburg and Gleiwitz, that have not seen a customer for weeks as a result of the anti-Jewish boycott.

Since the Nazi regime has been in power in Upper Silesia, only two Jewish weddings have taken place there, and even these were just family affairs, without music and without festivities.

Despite the fact that the Jews have lived in Upper Silesia for a thousand years, constitute two or three percent of the population and have taken a prominent part in the cultural and industrial development of the region, they have now become beggars in the towns they helped to build and enrich, the Guardian concludes.